It’s the start of the year, so what better way to start the year than to make a list of technologies I’d like to learn and get experience with over the next 12 months:

Frontend

• View & React - I have done a bunch of tutorials for both of these frameworks and I’ve read the docs, and lots of blog articles, so I’ve got a good idea how they work, but I haven’t had a chance yet to build or work on a full sized production application using these
• Figma & Sketch - I’ve concentrated most of my web development on backend technologies, and most of the frontend work I have done has been using vanilla javascript and JQuery, with quite a lot of Bootstrap to get the UIs looking reasonable, so I’d really like to learn the basics of a design tool so as to be able to create wireframes and mock-ups, these two appear to be the most popular at the minute
• Web components - I’d like to build some UIs using the platform’s component framework, so that I can build robust UIs that will last many years without needing much refactoring and upgrades, I have a good idea how they work but haven’t had the time yet to build real world production apps that use them, so I don’t yet have a good sense of when they are the best choice for a frontend project

Backend

• Elastic search - The text search I’ve done to date has been using the features offered by the MongoDB toolset which work alright, but for really great search, which is something most websites need, the best technology in town appears to be elastic search
• Kubernetes - Though I’m interested in serverless for some tasks/scenarios where it makes sense, I like to self host applications, usually on standard Linux VPS servers, however the new technology in town is clearly Kubernetes, which solves a lot of the infrastructure provisioning, and workload assignment challenges in a way that can be multi-cloud and well integrated with CI/CD systems
• Raspberry Pi - I’m super interested in the internet of things space, this could be just as a hobby initially, but I think these is the potential for a lot of interesting web development work in this space, I also have some long term pipe dreams of creating a hardware product at some stage in the future, Raspberry Pi seems like a great place to start

I might add some more if I think of any in the next few days/weeks. If I do I will post the update to the linkblog which you can follow using the RSS Feed.

Happy new year and I wish you all the best for 2021!

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@markjgsmith

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Originally posted on blog.markjgsmith.com